Visualising Geographic Environments: City 17

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Professor Ifan Shepherd of the University of Middlesex and Lestyn D Bleasdale-Shepherd of Valve presented an interesting talk at the International Conference on Developments in Visualization and Virtual Environments in Geographic Information Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on the use of haptic feedback devices and games and their implications for virtual geographic environments.

Of note was the number of games begin developed on the XBox 360 based around Microsoft's Virtual Earth. We will have more on this over the coming days, it is looking like Virtual Earth will be the one to watch in the next six to twelve months with some notable developments due.




The use of the Xbox controller in games such as Half Life, based around City 17 and embedded above, opens up a whole new way to provide feedback to the user when visualising geographic information. Perhaps in the next 5 years we will be using games consoles more and more as machines geared towards both research and visualisation in the geographical sciences?

A higher resolution version of the movie can be downloaded here (wmv, 33Mb)